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Trading cards are cool again

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Re: Trading cards are cool again

#81

Post by dimator »

hgibbs wrote: post #27

At the beginning of the most recent lockdown in my city I had been introduced by a friend to magic (specifically commander), and I had played enough with him to have started to be annoyed at how often I was losing - so I went out and bought a couple of decks. My girlfriend and I were immediately hooked, and have been playing every other day since then (2-3 months now). Now that the lockdown has lifted I am able to pl…

Ah I wish I had a friend like you. I wanted badly to get into the game, and I tried to get people into it without success. My spouse tried once but it was most definitely not her thing.

I went to a little tcg bootstrapping event at my local game store (way before covid), and that was fun, but everyone else there was such a pro that I felt really intimidated and out of place.

Anyway now I have a little pile of cards in a drawer :(

Re: Trading cards are cool again

#82

Post by curryst »

dimator wrote: post #81
hgibbs wrote: post #27

At the beginning of the most recent lockdown in my city I had been introduced by a friend to magic (specifically commander), and I had played enough with him to have started to be annoyed at how often I was losing - so I went out and bought a couple of decks. My girlfriend and I were immediately hooked, and have been playing every other day since then (2-3 months now). Now that the lockdown has lifted I am able to pl…

Ah I wish I had a friend like you. I wanted badly to get into the game, and I tried to get people into it without success. My spouse tried once but it was most definitely not her thing. I went to a little tcg bootstrapping event at my local game store (way before covid), and that was fun, but everyone else there was such a pro that I felt really intimidated and out of place. Anyway now I have a little pile of cards i…

It's not quite as fun, but you can play MTG: Arena on a phone or laptop to learn the game enough to keep up. It's free, and made by the same company. You only have to pay if you don't want to play enough to earn cards, or want to build decks with a lot of rare cards (which are not common to see in Quickplay).

There are also online platforms that let you use real cards to play online. It's like Zoom, but with health counters and you aim your webcam at your board.

Or, if you go to an event, tell people you're new and ask if they want to play a jank game. Jank decks are basically decks that people like for reasons other than it being effective, i.e. a deck of cards they just like the art on, or that uses an effect that's fun but not very good. That should bring the power level down to where you can actually compete.

Also, don't be afraid to ask people to break something down. I've never seen anyone be upset about that. The Magic rules are 400 something pages long, and most cards have had online rule clarifications added to them individually. No one is expecting you to just "know" how everything works.

It's a fun game, I wish you luck in finding a group! I think Reddit has an active MTG community, you could look there.

Re: Trading cards are cool again

#83

Post by jtsiskin »

marcellus23 wrote: post #61
brianwawok wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I can’t hold a NFT. I don’t see people in 100 years talking about a rare cat meme NFT like we talk about a 100 year old antique coffee grinder. But hey, I could be wrong.

Not only can’t you hold it, but anyone can trivially get their own identical copy of it.

I can make a counterfeit baseball or Pokémon trading card which looks identical to the real thing, or even “better”. Yet those don’t sell for nearly as much. Why is that?

Re: Trading cards are cool again

#84

Post by jtsiskin »

dehrmann wrote: post #15
lettergram wrote: post #5

My instant thought was “NFTs”!! NFTs are effectively the new reading cards. It’s gonna explode then implode, but I know a lot of people are getting into it.

Or cryptocurrencies. Picking on NFTs, at least I can frame and look at a baseball card, maybe show it to visitors. NFTs have even less utility.

If this were true, counterfeit baseball cards should have the same value as “real” ones, and I would have a very profitable company producing beautiful Mickey Mantle cards. So where do you think the real value is?

Re: Trading cards are cool again

#85

Post by March_f6 »

hgibbs wrote: post #27

At the beginning of the most recent lockdown in my city I had been introduced by a friend to magic (specifically commander), and I had played enough with him to have started to be annoyed at how often I was losing - so I went out and bought a couple of decks. My girlfriend and I were immediately hooked, and have been playing every other day since then (2-3 months now). Now that the lockdown has lifted I am able to pl…

Same! Commander nights at my local LGS have quickly become the highlights of my week. Scryfall has also become my most frequented website next to hn.

Re: Trading cards are cool again

#86

Post by kgwgk »

cainxinth wrote: post #74
ramraj07 wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You mean like Tesla? Or even any of the top tech companies?

Tesla does have good fundamentals and a good trajectory as a car company. They make a product that people want, that sells well even with large margins, for which demand is expected to continue to grow. The fact that the market ran up its stock price till the P/E went stratospheric doesn’t make their core business any less viable. If Tesla stock crashes, it likely won’t be because of anything the company did, but bec…

> The fact that the market ran up its stock price till the P/E went stratospheric doesn’t make their core business any less viable.

Of course the highly inflated stock price doesn't make their business less viable. It does make it more viable! They've raised large amounts of capital at very favorable terms.

In any case, the point is that the price is quite dettached from those "good fundamentals".

Re: Trading cards are cool again

#87

Post by vmception »

cageface wrote: post #56
vmception wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

this is too reductive, there are entire generations of people, plural , that don't draw the line at "I can't hold it". People said the same thing about mp3s and digital music, the people they were criticizing have children now. both of these recipient generations don't care. but to say more about what you are missing - without drawing a different conclusion just adding an extra variable - is to look at how issuers ac…

I'm not sure mp3s are a good example. Vinyl is booming because many people want a physically tangible medium and streaming services are otherwise teaching a generation that music isn't something worth owning.

how is that a counterpoint when the whole point of this thread is that everything is booming

there is nothing to extrapolate from any of it, only to understand the behaviors of the market

Re: Trading cards are cool again

#88

Post by cageface »

vmception wrote: post #87
cageface wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not sure mp3s are a good example. Vinyl is booming because many people want a physically tangible medium and streaming services are otherwise teaching a generation that music isn't something worth owning.

how is that a counterpoint when the whole point of this thread is that everything is booming there is nothing to extrapolate from any of it, only to understand the behaviors of the market

The point is mp3s and paid digital downloads specifically are not booming. Not many people seem interested in that version of ownership.

Re: Trading cards are cool again

#89

Post by tmm84 »

hgibbs wrote: post #27

At the beginning of the most recent lockdown in my city I had been introduced by a friend to magic (specifically commander), and I had played enough with him to have started to be annoyed at how often I was losing - so I went out and bought a couple of decks. My girlfriend and I were immediately hooked, and have been playing every other day since then (2-3 months now). Now that the lockdown has lifted I am able to pl…

Commander is very fun and really requires some brain power/strategy to win (I won once because the two remaining players accidentally took fatal damage, blocked creatures that died killed the attacker and the trample damage killed the defending player). Commander focused cards (not being reprinted anytime soon) have been going up in price during the "pandemic". I was playing commander at least several months before the "pandemic" began and I have been hot/cold with my enthusiasm for it because of price spikes and targeted buyouts. So, if you are getting into commander and want to buy into a custom deck it could be getting more expensive in the future.

I actually got out of Pokemon cards when the "pandemic" began. Almost every store was sold out of packs (I'm in Japan btw). This has been the case the whole time and I have a feeling that Pokemon cards produced during this time frame aren't going to hold value (a lot of product has been opened and when it floods the market it will be worth little).

Re: Trading cards are cool again

#90

Post by OldHand2018 »

adventured wrote: post #9
pram wrote: post #2

Absolutely everything is frothy right now. I wouldn’t make any long term conclusions from the markets today, since this seems like an exceptional time. That is to say, I think the “bull case” for many things atm are heavily tainted by irrational exuberance.

The higher-end of the card collecting hobby has changed permanently. The card companies are putting a lot of effort and money into producing unique or otherwise limited cards (autographs, relics, rare prints, etc). That's not going to stop. For example a lot of the more common rookie card prices have already deflated back toward something closer to sane prices. Take the Greg Maddux 1987 Leaf rookie card - that went u…

Yeah, the higher end is “different” because card grading is a gatekeeper into the market.

There are a lot more PSA 10 quality cards sitting in collections ungraded than have been graded and are “in circulation”. But now that those top cards are 6-figures and higher, nobody in their right mind is going to put one of those things in the mail and not get it back for 12-18 months (the grading firms aren’t even accepting cards now anyway). Something worth $1 million once graded is worth $1000 ungraded. You can’t insure it for $1 million until it’s graded. Chicken v. Egg.

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